"It looked like a cloud blew over. And it got darker and darker," he said. "I got up and opened the front door, and, my God, everything was burning."

A palm tree "went up like a huge torch, these embers floating up through the air," he said. "I ran upstairs and got my son and said, 'Come on, we got to get the boat out of here.' "

Davis, 54, returned to find his neighborhood barricaded. He parked beyond it and walked in. "The fire was burning right across the street," he said.

Davis said he was watering his neighbor's flaming roof when a firefighter took his hose from him and climbed onto his roof with it. "The paint was blistering and melted my satellite," he said. "It sort of looked like my house was getting ready to go."

But singed and blistered as it was, his house did not burn down.

But his neighbor's did.

Not everyone who was rescued from Tuesday's raging fire left home willingly.

A stubborn pit bull had to be coerced away from late-morning danger on Rock Creek Court.

Stockton police Officer David Blough and an unidentified animal control officer, realizing the pit bull was trapped inside an unoccupied home, went inside to rescue it. They came out minutes later with the animal on a catchpole.

Homeowner Mark Gines, a correctional officer with the California Youth Authority, arrived at the scene an hour later. After being reunited with his pet, Gines thanked Blough for his efforts.

The back of Gines' home was charred by the fast-moving blaze along Interstate 5, but the front was spared. The house next door was destroyed.